The Place Rudy Forgot

And no one ever will care about the Bronx unless Fernando Ferrer, that borough's Great Hispanic Hope, is elected mayor in 2001. I like Ferrer because I graduated a decade after he did from the same Bronx high school?Cardinal Spellman. I'll vote for the man and I'll back a loser, and the Bronx will probably remain forgotten.

Outside of the Yankees, when the Bronx makes the news it's usually bad. The tabloids have been flooded with stories recently about how the murder rate in the Bronx has increased by 50 percent. Mayor Giuliani said, "If you were to take the Bronx out of the city's statistics, then murder is down in the entire city."

He then informed the media that he was "very, very perplexed" as to why the Bronx's murder rate is out of control. Actually, he knows why. The reason is that, up in the Bronx, Giuliani's known as "Manhattan's Mayor." I know of activists who, for years, have pleaded with the Giuliani administration and the appropriate city agencies to help them quell the rising crime rate, especially in the 52nd and 47th Precincts. Not much help has come.

The reason the 52nd and the 47th are seeing a substantial increase in murders is, unsurprisingly, the drug trade. Since 1995, Manhattan North has received federal, state and city drug-initiative money to crack down on drug-selling in Washington Heights. The 34th Precinct has witnessed a dramatic decrease in crime and murder, in large part because the drug dealers have moved across the river to the Bronx, which receives no such funding for extra cops and equipment. Washington Heights is in Manhattan; the neighborhood's Dominicans had to be brought down a notch so that the Upper West Side's caring liberals could feel safe again.

I grew up in the 52nd Precinct, and still go back there once in a while. In 1970 the neighborhood was 70 percent Irish and Jewish and 30 percent black and Hispanic. That didn't make it a "good" neighborhood, to use the code word that liberals use to describe a neighborhood that's predominately white. Even in 1970 it was a brutal and unforgiving district to grow up in, and you were safe if you minded your own business?maybe. Working-class whites got fed up with being abandoned by the city and fled. By 1975 the neighborhood's numbers had reversed themselves. Now my childhood neighborhood is 75 percent Puerto Rican and Dominican. The remaining 25 percent is made up of blacks, Cambodians and a very few white ethnics who never left.

I still know some people in the 52nd Precinct. Now when you see an old friend there, you give him the 70s soul handshake, and throw in a hiphop elbow hug. I've never had a problem walking around the old 'hood as a white man?probably because a big beefy Irish guy is assumed to be a cop, and knowing a few thugs never hurts. But the old place has a bad, dangerous feel to it, and the dealers ply their trade completely in the open.

Murder has always had a home there. Before my family fled to the North Bronx in 1972, we saw a few. The worst was a slaying at a bar on Briggs Ave. A 16-year-old Irish girl named Griff walked innocently out of a pub, only to be greeted by her scorned boyfriend. The boyfriend pulled out a kitchen knife and cut her up in front of the whole neighborhood. She died with her blood spilling into the gutter. I think it was then that my father knew we had to get out.

So we went east and north to the 47th Precinct, which was segregated into black, Irish and Italian enclaves. Unlike the 52nd Precinct, where all the races were mixed, you knew your place in this one, and no one ever ventured out of it for very long. I remember some of the 47th's cops from back in the 70s. These were bitter, middle-aged humps, enraged that the city hadn't raised their pay. Some of them would raid schoolyards, roust the teenagers who were hanging out and take whatever they had: beer, pot, gambling money. They usually wouldn't even bother to arrest you. Just take your shit and keep it, and there wasn't a damn thing you could do about it. You think any city agency would give a damn that a bunch of Bronx kids had their drugs, beer and stolen merchandise boosted by cops?

But now, in 2000, Bronx's 47th Precinct is a murder factory. I have some concerns about it because my mother and brother still live there. What has happened is that Jamaican and African-American gangs have conducted a bitter street war over who will control the pot trade. Pot is becoming this decade's crack. Everyone wants to smoke it, and you don't have to worry about the users?at least they're not as bad as crack users. Still, the pot dealers are as brutal as any crack-dealing gang. The 47th has always been a good place to cop weed, but it's still hard to envision pot dealers killing one other. In the Bronx, though, anything goes.

Back in the late 70s, Italians and Jamaicans controlled the drug trade in the 47th. The Jamaicans were no bother; they always sold their weed at a nice weight and a fair price. The Italians were another story. One day they'd be your best buddies, the next day they'd chase you off their block with bats. It got so bad that everyone gave up on them. Italians once confronted some Irish guys from my neighborhood about why the Irish copped off blacks instead of off good white men like themselves. One of the Irish kids eyed the Italians up and down and said, "You guys ain't white."

Well, now the Italians are gone and the Jamaicans rule. Add into the mix the hiphop violence of the younger crew, and you've got pot dealers walking around like they're badass drug kingpins. This city used to be a better place?or at least more comprehensible.